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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Herbison, C.C. "B(l)ack to the World: Explorations of Race, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in Selected Vietnam War Films," American Studies, University of Kansas, June 2006.
Given the large numbers of black soldiers who served in the Vietnam War and the complex nature of the conflict’s race relations, most existing filmic representations of the black Vietnam experience are woefully inaccurate and simplistic. Furthermore, scholarly discourse surrounding Vietnam War films has consistently neglected the complexity and diversity of that experience. This dissertation serves as a partial corrective to the relative absence of discussions of race and ethnicity in Vietnam War films. It focuses on four cinematic portrayals of the black returning veteran, on his attempt to make sense of the Vietnam experience and, most critically, on his quest to heal the physical, emotional, and psychic wounds that too often remain untended. These films—Another Brother, Ashes and Embers, Green Eyes, and Dumbarton Bridge—represent alternative discourses that supplement as well as challenge existing notions of the black Vietnam experience. Such films have the potential to increase public awareness of the black veteran’s wartime experience and postwar plight, and to hasten the healing process for the individual and the nation. The primary theoretical framework for this dissertation emerges from two works by Arthur W. Frank—At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness and The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics—both of which explore the nature of serious illness and the stories that people tell as they contend with such illnesses. The latter study identifies three basic narratives of illness: restitution narratives, chaos narratives, and quest narratives. I argue that these three illness patterns also emerge from the four films at the center of this study. This dissertation adopts an additional thoeretical framework, one that powerfully unites Frank’s narratives of healing and the black experience in the United States. I contend that each of the four films explored in this dissertation represents a unique narrative of race, trauma, illness, and healing that chronicles a people’s journey as well as an individual’s quest.
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